Hi Judy
My students learned to write "thesis statements" about their intent for their work, and stand up and declare them (of course the beginning students only wrote 1 or 2 sentences, and by the time they were seniors in high school they wrote paragraphs). What that means is this: If you are teaching the color wheel, and you let students decide on their own what form the color wheel will have, your students have to tell the class what form they have decided on and why, and then during the critique process, the class refers back to what the student said at the beginning of the project. So, if a kid says "I will make my color wheel in the shape of a sunflower, with the petals in the order of a colorwheel, with the center seeds representing the equal amounts of opposites on the color wheel" That is a basic thesis statement that I would accept from a beginning student. Then when we critique it, we can ask questions like "does it have all of the primary, secondary, and teriary colors?", "does it look like a sunflower?", "are the seeds the appropriate color"? In this way students are taught that there is planning in making art, and one does not "wing it". AND, in the case of YOU being observed, you need to know in order to defend the arts in an academic way, YOU have to make sure that your students are not just making art to express themselves, because quite frankly they can do that at home without you, but that the art they are making is based on a framework that you are teaching them.